Generation A

by Douglas Coupland

  “Okay, then, Trevor it is.”

  “Thanks.”

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  Trevor’s boss was a career bureaucrat, not a scientist, and Trevor’s pleas to upgrade his job category were met first by a yawn and then by a recollection that young whippersnappers pissed him off. If Trevor’s boss had his way, the world’s cocky young scientists would be corralled and put to work on the night shift at the Department of Standardized Weights and Measures. “So, Trevor, my dear, please shut the fuck up. Oh, and by the way, I run an even-keeled ship here. I don’t want highs and I don’t want lows. This place will be running long after you and I are dead, so please just go back to separating your water droplets. If you find the job boring, so be it. Boredom is a form of criticism—so maybe you should go job-hunting. Goodbye.”

  As this was being said, Trevor was thinking: Is Suzanne cheating on me? What good is a girlfriend you can’t trust? The whole notion of girlfriend seemed American and synthetic, an archaic pairing concept from Pixar cartoons. Domestic partner? No, they didn’t live together. Close personal friend? No. Technically, they were nothing. They just spent a lot of post-work time together, having sex and eating, and it was all going nowhere, and besides, she was so goddam political when she wasn’t in the sack, and when she got going on Zionism and all that, it was like she’d turned herself into the world’s most unlistenable satellite music station. She’d start to blab and he’d go off into daydreams about long-chain carbon molecules, his mother’s knee-replacement surgery or old Smurf cartoons, only to be roused by a poke in the ribs and a jeremiad along the lines of, “And who do you think ended up paying for the Six-Day War, huh? Who? Tell me, who!”

  And there are other things to know about Trevor, things that made him worry, that led to his crash and burn and a dirty weekend (if that was what he wanted) in a lovely but spookily geriatric apartment in scenic Locarno. For example, Trevor was a gambler. Not a casino gambler—no Baden-Baden or San Sebastian for him; rather, he was the most incurable form of gambler, one of the ones who goes to Gamblers Anonymous meetings and everyone else in the room feels a chill in their hearts. It was more than just the fact that he’d memorized the entire cyber-tour of all of Harrah’s Nevada properties, and it was more than the fact that the first sentence out of his mouth was: “I’ve been here sixty minutes already and I can guarantee you, 3 to 1, that all of the people in this room can’t go without coughing for sixty seconds, starting now.” They knew Trevor was a hopeless case because they saw that his need to gamble was so hard-wired into his brain that his life was one perpetual bet. He was consigned to live in the constant near future. He was always inside various levels of “next.” He was never in the “now.”

  The next three stoplights may or may not be green—and if they’re not, then what are the chances I’ll see three red cars before I pull into the school’s lot? Or yellow cars? You don’t see yellow cars any more—why? Leo in Gamma Studies says yellow paint lowers the chance of reselling the car later on. But by what percentage would yellow paint versus silver kill the deal? Go online. Look up car colour trends since 1987; cross-index them with actual resale charts. Maybe buy a yellow car, even, if the odds favour you. Is Suzanne fucking around? There’s the office. Email will take my mind off things. Email! The odds that she’s cheating are 1 in 3. The odds that she’s cheating are 2 in 5.

  Zack said, “Serge, hang on a second. You have a gambling problem?”

  “I’m not Trevor.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “Take from my story whatever you like. And please give me a sip of your dandelion wine, if you will.”

  Harj kindly held a glass of wine and a straw to my mouth. I took a sip and then we returned to our friend “Trevor.”

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  Trevor lost all of his junior researcher paycheques playing online poker and was living on economic fumes. He ate only bread and cheese, and one day he bought rabbit because it seemed both inexpensive and kind of cool. When Suzanne came into the kitchen and saw raw rabbit skinned and lying atop brown waxed paper on the kitchen counter, she screamed and ran into the bathroom, crying. Trevor sat outside the locked bathroom door, asking her what was wrong and to please come out.

  Suzanne finally opened the door and said that cooking rabbits was like cooking babies. Seeing the pieces there like that reminded her of abortions she’d had that she wasn’t very proud of. She was going to take what few things she kept in his apartment and leave.

  And so Trevor was single, broke from gambling debts (Ladbrokes Online; Club USA Casino), crippled by never-ending gambling chatter inside his head and saddled with an asshole science-hating boss. He was wondering if the pieces of his life would ever join together like a story when his phone rang. It was Solange from the international sales division in Lyons, saying that the VP of sales was so impressed by his idea to ship time-expired antidepressants to the United Arab Emirates that he wanted to personally reward Trevor with keys to the VIP suite on Lake Maggiore. As well as the suite, a generous sum had been deposited into Trevor’s bank account. Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé!

  Trevor got on a train to Switzerland that followed a coastal route and then moved inland: Monaco, Genoa, Milan and Locarno. He hadn’t packed very much because, while happy to be escaping his life, however briefly, he was too angry and worried to pack—and because he was young enough that he could still sleep in his clothes and, when he woke up, look rumpled and sexy rather than squished and homeless. So he was on this train and he had no laptop—his first holiday from information ever.

  Sam said, “Wait a second . . . you went somewhere without a laptop or PDA?”

  “Trevor did, yes.”

  “What was he thinking?”

  “He paid for his mistake.”

  “Go on . . .”

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  Trevor had nothing to read, and so, bored by the glamorous Mediterranean views, he walked through the train’s cars, looking for reading material left behind by previous passengers. In a second-class car, along with some abandoned homework, he found a much-disintegrated copy of Finnegans Wake ( James Joyce; 1939), a novel that, when he opened it and selected a random paragraph, made him feel like he’d just had a stroke. He spoke English, but this didn’t feel like English—it felt like sound effects. Still, the paragraph burned itself into his brain:

  Sian is too tall for Shemus as Airdie is fiery for Joachem. Two toughnecks still act gettable, and feign that as an embryo he was worthy of starving (he was an outlier straddling the walls of Donegal and Sligo, and a vassal to Corporal. Mr. Llyrfoxh Cleath was among his savoured invitations) but every fair thee well to night blindness came uninvited. He was in the wilds of the city of today; coals that his night-embered life will not beg being anthologized in black and white. Adding lies and jest together, two toughneck shots may be made at what this abundant wallflower. Sian’s nighttime wardrobe, we believe, a handful of ring fingers, a callow stomach, a heart of tea and cakes, a goose liver, three-fourths of a buttock, a black adder truncated—as young Master Johnny on his first louche moment at the birth of prethinking, seeing himself Lord this and Lord that, playing with thistlecracks in the hedgerow.

  He sat down and went through the paragraph over and over. It could have said:

  . . . Whaam! Smash! Ahooogah! Ding! Grunt! Sploosh! Doinggg! Thud! Bamm! Shazaam! Glub! Zing! Blbbbtt! Thump! Gonggg! Boom! Kapow!

  Joyce’s paragraph made no sense, and yet it made a kind of sense. Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.
>
  Trevor had an idea about how to decompose Finnegans Wake further. He went to the train’s men’s room and held the paragraph up to a mirror, and then he turned the book upside down, still gazing at the same paragraph, and the whole thing turned into pure optical mush, into encrypted code, into Punjabi. He unscrunched a tissue flap somewhere in his neocortex and pretended he was looking at a new language altogether.

  Then he went back into the car and sat down, bought a coffee from a passing trolley and reread the paragraph, and he wondered if it might be possible for his brain to turn the paragraph into mush without the benefit of a mirror and reorientation—in the same way that if you say a person’s name over and over and over, it stops making sense.

  So he squinted, then opened his eyes wide, and lo, somewhere before Genoa he found that he could turn print into meaningless mush. Letters and words became lines and blobs, and Trevor felt, for the first time in years, a sense of peace, a sense of—wait . . . holy shit!—the entire time he’d been performing this exercise, Trevor hadn’t once thought of gambling. This is not fucking possible. Was this strange novel a cure for his brain’s incessant gambling chatter? Could this really be happening? And so he opened the book and began to read chunks of it and then turn those chunks back into mush in his head, and he felt nothing but bliss as the train pulled into Milan’s Stazione Centrale, where he had to change trains for Locarno.

  Walking through the train station was a joy. He felt that cool, silent, ultra-clear peace you feel around seven at night when you realize that a long hangover is one hundred percent gone. He had forty-five minutes to kill, so he went into a bar and ordered a rather expensive red wine and savoured the silence inside his skull, falling into a reverie broken by an announcement that the Locarno train was about to leave. He made a dash to his platform and barely boarded in time. Once he sat down, he realized he’d left Finnegans Wake and his mobile phone in the bar. Merde. Well, he could read it online once he got to Switzerland and located a computer.

  But as the train’s wheels rolled forward, his gambling mania returned worse than ever—it felt like his brain was punishing him for having taken a holiday from himself: odds that more than fifty percent of people in this car are using mobile phones: 1 in 7; odds that the next woman who walks into this car is good-looking: 3 in 5. And on and on. He found a magazine in a vinyl pouch beside the seat and tried to read it, but no go—he wanted his Finnegans Wake, dammit. He tried making his brain go random and stared at a flatscreen monitor crawling with stock index numbers while three members of a TV news team discussed Typhoon Ling-Ling. Odds of 3 to 5 that Typhoon Ling-Ling is a Category 4.

  His train pulled into Locarno. It was cold and there was a small amount of snow on the ground.

  One in 4 the next cab driver’s fat. Four to 5 they have my favourite kind of ham. Even odds of someone fuckable appearing in the next one-minute window.

  He taxied to his guest apartment and opened its door. At first glance, it was a beautiful place to be. It was a homely apartment, designed neither with, nor without, style—more old-fashioned than Ikean, its furniture evoking no memories of time or place—a hotel room, essentially. Fine. But there was no TV, no computer, no wireless router, no radio or stereo system, not even a telephone—nothing electronic. He wondered what sort of aging freak would live in a no-tech world. What kind of VIP suite was this? He was already imagining an explanation from Corporate: the absence of technology creates a timelessness that is restful and conducive to meditation. Right.

  When I began to describe the boring room, my five friends’ eyes opened wide. “Right, I know what you’re all thinking—the boring room and all. Let me get on with this.”

  I went on.

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  Trevor began to wonder, and then to fantasize about, how many emails he had in his mailbox, rich, juicy, fun emails . . . 37? 41? 43? 257? 99,829? Maybe his ex-girlfriend had sent him a kiss-and-make-up note. Maybe she had enclosed pictures of herself. And maybe if I looked, I could find Finnegans Wake online.

  By now it was dark out, and because it was Switzerland, everything was shut, even the Internet café that catered to the young. Fuck. At the train station, he considered asking someone if he could borrow their PDA, but then realized he’d just look like a con artist. Then he thought more about all the no-doubt incredible emails that were sitting there in cyberland, just waiting for him, and he put aside his pride and asked a passing younger person if he could borrow his PDA. He was told to fuck off.

  The station shut down and Trevor walked back to the apartment. He searched for books to read; nothing. There was no food in the fridge or cupboards, not even condiments. Desperate for words to look at, he ultimately located an unopened envelope of Knorr Swiss cream of cauliflower soup mix lying flat on the topmost shelf. He tried to scramble the words on the label but instead got a headache. He looked at them upside down in the mirror, but the magic of the train ride was gone. Only books seemed to work for him.

  He finally realized that he was stuck in this room for, if nothing else, the night.

  He closed the curtains and went to bed. Lying there, his head shooting out sparks in all directions and his eyes closed, he made a bet with himself: if I open my eyes, there’s a 1-in-2 chance I’ll be able to see a chink of light passing through a gap in the curtains.

  Trevor opened his eyes. There was no chink of light from the cold Swiss night. He opened and closed his eyes. It was equally dark either way. Which was interesting. The moment he opened his eyes, even though there was nothing to see either way, his brain automatically shifted gears—he could feel it happening: visual cortex; no visual cortex; visual cortex; no visual cortex—a subtle but distinct switch. Do blind people have this same cortical shift? Does keeping your eyes open in the dark waste brain capacity? It was odd to be able to psych out his brain so easily and mechanically.

  And then, as Trevor shifted between forms of darkness, he decided to pave the way for the next phase of his life. He wanted to know more about brains and how they shifted gears, and he wanted to be able to find out if there was some kind of chemical or mechanical switch that could turn off the gambling cortex in his head. With Finnegans Wake and other books, he might be able to tone down the symptoms, but the treasure was out there and it wanted to be found.

  Trevor fled back to Montpelier on the 5:40 a.m. train. Rifling through his small attaché case, he found his copy of Finnegans Wake nestled inside a pair of track pants. Merde!

  Once home, he searched online for who was doing the most work in neuroproteins, then a new field. He also emailed requests to colleagues everywhere, telling them what kind of job he was looking for. Soon he got a nibble from a company in a place with the bizarre name of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

  Trevor thought, A place name that uses the word “Triangle”? And North Carolina? What is North Carolina? Is it so incredibly different from South Carolina that their names merit subsets?

  The strangeness of the company’s location and its complete disconnection from his European life were catnip to Trevor. He wanted new experiences in his brain, not old, predictable ones. Were he to remain in Europe, his new experiences would only ever have the same texture as a cover version of a song he already knew—old buildings doing riffs on other old buildings; bahnhofs and gares and staziones; change / cambio / wechsel. Going to America would be like learning a whole new kind of music.

  Once there, he did everything he could to maximize a new-seeming life: he bought a Chevrolet minivan; he shopped at malls; he said things like Have a nice day to strangers. He even found a new girlfriend, Amber, who had won two Subway franchises in a divorce suit and who had a close personal relationship with her Lord and Saviour, Jesus—which, as with his pro-Palestinian ex-girlfriend, consumed most of her small talk and which he also tuned out, simultaneously jealous of and turned on by her commitment to faith and to fresh, healthful sandwiches. But mostly he threw himsel
f into work, researching the exciting new world of time-suppressing drugs that made life seem either longer or shorter, depending on the user’s life situation. He knew that if an anti-gambling protein existed, here was the place to find it.

  On a professional level, the lone factor that hindered his research was time itself. In order to see whether time felt long or short, test subjects had to actually be using the drug for a while. A year, minimum. Prisoners were the main test subjects, but they weren’t being told whether the drugs they were getting made time feel longer or shorter, and Trevor actually felt sorry for those who got the time-stretching drug—it was like putting the prisoners in a prison within a prison.

  “So, wait a second,” said Diana. “How old was Trevor at this point?”

  “Maybe his late twenties.”

  “Did he take the drugs for his gambling problem?”

  “Let us find out.”

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  At the same time, Trevor, with growing shame, was again racking up gambling debts, though not as quickly as in Europe, because he now had his ragged copy of Finnegans Wake to stop the urge. A colleague recommended James Joyce’s Ulysses, but it was like the lower-priced house brand of Finnegans Wake. Still, his losses added up and, not unlike Zack’s Superman, his powers of resistance began to ebb.

  Curiously, it was at this same time that a perplexed colleague diagnosed two people with a rare condition called logo dysphoria—the inability to perceive corporate logos. These “logosuppressives” would look at corporate logos and see a blob of colour—they failed to perceive logos in the way that stroke victims fail to perceive letters and numbers. He called Trevor for help and advice.

  Zack asked, “So . . . they’d see a Nike logo but not recognize it?”

  “Basically.”

  “That’s bullcrap.”

  “One would think, but no. Listen further . . .”

  The Gambler

  (continued)